Andrea Berger's List: Community of Practice

• The term “community of practice” is of relatively recent coinage, even though the phenomenon it refers to is age-old. The concept has turned out to provide a useful perspective on knowing and learning.
• The term “community of practice” is of relatively recent coinage, even though the phenomenon it refers to is age-old. The concept has turned out to provide a useful perspective on knowing and learning. A growing number of people and organizations in various sectors are now focusing on communities of practice as a key to improving their performance.
• It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people.
• Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice.

• What do communities of practice look like?

   

  Communities develop their practice through a variety of activities. The following table provides a few typical examples:

• Where is the concept being applied?

   

  The concept of community of practice has found a number of practical applications in business, organizational design, government, education, professional associations, development projects, and civic life.
• The first applications of communities of practice have been in teacher training and in providing isolated administrators with access to colleagues. There is a wave of interest in these peer-to-peer professional-development activities. But in the education sector, learning is not only a means to an end: it the end product.

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• Online participation is used to describe the interaction between users and online communities on the web. Online community often involve members to provide content to the website and/or contribute in some way. Examples of such include wikis, blogs, online multiplayer games, and other types of social platforms. Online participation is currently a heavily researched field. It provides insight into fields such as web design, online marketing, crowdsourcing, and many areas of psychology. Some subcategories that fall under online participation are: commitment to online communities, coordination & interaction, and member recruitment.

• One of these challenges is the need to negotiate the ―essential tension of teacher community‖ or the tension between professional development geared to learning new pedagogical practices and that devoted to deepening teachers’ subject matter knowledge in the disciplines of instruction. The authors—who deliberately built this tension into the project—claim that these two facets of professional development must both be respected in any successful attempt to create and sustain intellectual community in the workplace.

• Communities of Practice are a theory of learning however during the preparation of the book 'Knowledge Networks: Innovation through Communities of Practice' (Hildreth and Kimble, 2004), it became clear that Communities of Practice are now having an impact far beyond that in the field of education. This impact is being felt across the world in many areas of education:

   
   
  • Communities of Practice in the Classroom - i.e. the school as a community of learners
   
  • CoPs to support students
   
  • Virtual CoPs supporting new and existing teachers
   
  • CoPs in informal education
   
  • CoPs supporting educational specialists
   
  • Informal CoPs created by interested educational practitioners
   
  • CoPs in Higher and adult education
   
  • Local Area CoPs supporting teachers in specific geographical locations
   
  • CoPs in e-Learning
   
  • Curriculum specific CoPs
   
  • Subject specific CoPs e.g. English as a Foreign Language
• Teaching is a very personal and 'individual' activity, yet teachers benefit greatly from links with other teachers, both with colleagues in their own establishment and with colleagues in the wider teaching community.
• If young people are to have opportunities for full participation in school, the school must offer communities of practice with the same drawing power as the students' other communities - the same potential for participation that is offered in families, neighbourhoods, communities, workplaces, and clubs. This drawing power depends, among other things, on possibilities for meaningful participation, and on compatibility with participation in communities of practice outside of school.

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• Although the term "Community of Practice" is new, CoPs are not. Such groups  have been around ever since people in organizations realized they could benefit from  sharing their knowledge, insights, and experiences with others who have similar interests  or goals.

• Criticism

   
  • One of the major criticisms of the community of practice model is the near complete neglect of power differentials within organizations, and hierarchies. There are also considerable challenges associated with managing highly autonomous experts, let's say within a hospital or clinical environment, that do not get full airing in the CoP perspective. 
  • There is a sense that the CoP model fails to account for pre-existing conditions such as negative, hostile environments that may be contrary to effective work practices. Some critics of CoP examine the term ‘community’ itself which embodies positive connotations (again, not always in evidence in modern organizations) which is open to multiple interpretations and definitions. 
  • The five apprenticeships originally examined by Lave and Wenger (1991) in their seminal study of situated learning cover craft or task based activities. They looked at Yucatec midwives; Vai and Gola tailors; naval quartermasters; meat cutters; and non-drinking alcoholics. The apprentices studied are learning to replicate a certain set of tasks which is not always true witin organizations. There are some critics who argue for a separate category for professional communities of practice to account for these differences. 
  • The proliferation of online tools and social media have generated virtual communities of one kind or another. A central question is whether these are learning communities and if so how they differ from communities that depend on proximity, social familiarity and direct engagement to thrive. 
  • Though not strictly a criticism, the evidence in virtual communications suggests that, while strong social social ties may be important in the acquisition of professional skills, once professional status has been reached individuals can also acquire knowledge through weaker social ties facilitated through occasional virtual and distributed networks.